Bryan D. Palmer: The Time of Our Lives: Reflections on Work and Capitalist Temporalities
At certain moments in history, people perceive time itself differently, even grasping it in ways that break with past practices. Revolutions are such moments: the ossified old calendars [1] are frequently overthrown. Crises, like revolutions, lead to the restructuring of time and changes in how it is conceptualized. In 2020, as of the writing of this article, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was such a moment—a catalyst that accelerated and intensified the development of temporal concepts in recent years. Time, and how it has become a vital factor influencing the reorganization of work, lies at the heart of these changes; a rethinking of capitalist temporality seems especially important.
The crisis triggered by the coronavirus caused millions of people worldwide to be unable to leave their homes for work. The traditional divisions between day and night, labor and leisure, and private and public collapsed one after another, shattering the distinction between the workweek and the weekend that seemed to have become the basic template of daily life. Governments were forced to inject massive amounts of capital to keep large and small capital functioning and to sustain the livelihoods of countless workers whose ability to "do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" within established conventions was suddenly terminated. Many temporarily unemployed workers will undoubtedly lose their jobs permanently. For others, the expectation of working from home eliminated the long-accepted distinction between earning wages through labor outside the home and ceasing work to engage in social reproduction [2] within the home. In many respects, vast swathes of capitalist economies were "gig-ified," while other sectors labeled "essential" were caught in a dilemma between unrealistic and unachievable expectations of "service" and the harsh demands of despotic authority.
For many, the previous understanding of what constitutes working time has vanished into thin air; they must work regardless of whether it is day or night. Matters that originally belonged to different spaces—such as childcare, purchasing daily necessities, and attending to the boss's orders—are now all crammed into paid working hours. The limits on working time won through centuries of struggle, as well as the workplace health and safety rights gained after 1965, were ruthlessly discarded with the outbreak of the pandemic. COVID-19 pried open and detonated the Pandora's box of time and the working day. Can capital, and the state that serves its interests, easily retreat from this?
For socialists, time—its meaning and organization—has always been a core issue, if only because capitalism places significant emphasis on controlling time and subordinating it to capitalist requirements. In the current situation, time has become a challenge that socialists must address, not only because it defines what is and is not a working day, but because it is increasingly clear that time and its organization define life itself. Will time continue to be compressed into the requirements of capital, or will it be reimagined as an object of liberation, fought over continuously in ways that strengthen the project of human emancipation?
I. Time Becomes the Standard
Lucy Larcom, a "mill girl" in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA, had no interest in the noisy machinery of the early 19th-century Massachusetts textile factories and wrote poems titled "Early Doomed" and "A Stranger's Complaint." When she finally decided to leave the unsettling workplace, her boss asked: "Are you going where you can earn more money?" Larcom responded quickly: "No, I am going where I can have more time." Although Marx lived in a completely different world from Larcom, he well understood the desires of this mill worker; he once wrote that time "is the space for human development."
Capitalism has been operating for a long time, but it pays almost no attention to human development; its concept of progress narrows economic interests to guaranteeing the benefit of capital. As Jonathan Martineau points out: "In the modern temporal order in which we find ourselves, the measurement and organization of time is closely related to its alienation, for the simple reason that time is not measured and organized by us, but by capital; nor is it measured and organized for us, but for capital itself." Max Weber acknowledged Benjamin Franklin's understanding of the nascent capitalist spirit: "Since the measurement of time has become a uniform standard, and since precious time is cast into separate hours, the industrious person knows how to make good use of every block of time to do their work well. To squander time is effectively to squander money."
Marx recognized that the core contradiction of capital lies in its vampire-like insatiability: it seeks to create disposable labor time for the few while simultaneously converting the free time of the majority into surplus labor time used for accumulation. The subjugation of labor by capital is expanded and sustained by extracting wealth from direct mass consumption; therefore, "the results achieved by time spent on direct production must be relatively large, exceeding the immediate needs of reproduction for the capital used in these production sectors."
On the one hand, the cost of reproducing labor (including the foundations of human development such as housing, childcare, literacy, and cultural horizons) is restricted such that working people, in different ways, in different places, and throughout various historical periods, are forced into deteriorating material environments. Their development prospects are limited in every respect.
On the other hand, the resources spent on reproducing capital have historically been enormous, including costs calculated not in gold bars but in head counts—including imperial expansion (usually driven by war) that brought powerful freight transport benefiting only a few, the colonial plunder that conquered indigenous populations from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand, and the slave trade. As the transportation and communication revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries became increasingly prominent during the Industrial Revolution, the global expansion of railways, canals, aqueducts, and telegraph systems became the distinctive marks of a transformative era. Associated with this massive expenditure was the establishment of monitoring and regulatory mechanisms. From archives to asylums, including prisons, police forces, and public education systems, these were generally established with the support of the nation-state serving the needs of capital.
For Marx, this imbalance between human development and capitalist appropriation stands in opposition to the true socialization and expansion of wealth. In such an expansion, "the development of social productive forces will be so rapid that, although production will aim at the prosperity of all, the disposable time of all people will still increase. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. At that time, the measure of wealth will no longer be labor time, but disposable time." Conversely, what occurs under a system of insatiable individualism is the reduction of a portion of the working population to a surplus population, because the "frequent overproduction and frequent underproduction of modern industry" inevitably leads to "fluctuations and convulsions." Consequently, time and capital's appropriation of it eventually lead to a political economy of general dispossession, manipulated by upheaval, scarcity, and recurring crises, which can only be adjusted through revolutionary reversal.
Marx saw this subordination and its destructive consequences in the struggles of transition. In such struggles, time occupies a prominent position. Socialized man must reconfigure time to "rationally regulate their metabolic exchange with nature, putting it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as a blind force." This can only be achieved through the metabolic exchange within the realm of necessity, which is the basis of Marx's understanding of the dialectic of human and economic development. He believed that only when time, as a quintessential natural phenomenon, serves the associated producers rather than satisfying the greedy desires of capital, can the true realm of freedom flourish. This class struggle for a shorter working day was, in Marx's words, to protect the working class "against 'the serpent of their agonies.'" Capital's insatiable demand for consolidating labor time has fatal consequences; it "shortens the life of the labor power," "just as a greedy farmer increases the yield of the land by robbing it of its fertility." As time is reduced to money and consumed for its own benefit, capital begins to "prolong the laborer's production time within a given period by shortening his life." Therefore, it is necessary for the proletariat to establish a "powerful social barrier" in the form of legislation to limit the length of the working day, to prevent workers from "selling themselves and their descendants into death and slavery through a voluntary contract with capital." While the bourgeoisie claims to be the savior of humanity with "pompous titles like 'the inalienable rights of man,'" workers offer a "modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day" to clarify "when the time the worker sells is over, and when his own time begins." Although the struggle to reduce working hours is mandatory, it can only be an intermediate action. Marx noted: "the absolute limit to the shortening of the working day is the generalization of labor. In capitalist society, one class enjoys free time because the entire life-time of the masses is converted into labor-time." Under the capitalist system, reducing formal paid labor time is ultimately futile, yet it remains vital in the escalating class struggle. "The working day is thus not a constant, but a variable," and "the working day can be determined, but it is in and for itself indeterminate." To use labor power for all 24 hours of a working day is the inherent tendency of capitalist production.
Therefore, the call to limit the length of the working day—which measures much of the 19th-century working-class self-activity—is both necessary and insufficient as a foundation for proletarian liberation. Because in the process of redefining time itself, the working class inevitably faces this realization: their struggle is not merely for "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay," but even more for "the abolition of the wage labor system."
Ten-hour, nine-hour, and eight-hour leagues and Short Time Committees [3] became synonymous with worker uprisings; they declared themselves "merchants of time," acting in a way that extended the demand for reduced labor time into the broader sphere of social transformation. Whether it was the uprisings organized by the Short Time Committees to reduce labor hours between February and March 1867, or the confrontation between Chicago workers and police on May 4, 1886, for the eight-hour day, these were struggles centered on time. These struggles, vital to the interests of the working class, were completed by adapting workers to the logic of capital, which treats time as an input for producing profitable commodities. For capitalists who value capital accumulation, nothing is more important than increasing labor intensity while shortening labor time. The maintenance of this necessity depends on the hegemony of capital in a society predicated on property, supported by the state that maintains these property relations. Acceptance of this order is the cornerstone of the legal system, upon which the recognition of unions and the realization of their potential rights, including the right to collective bargaining, will eventually find a balance.
Marx wrote about all this before it happened. He appreciated this binary division centered on labor time, placing it at the heart of the struggle and recognizing that "the legal limitation of the working day" could end some of the illicit practices in capitalist exploitation. "The compulsory shortening of the working day gave a powerful impetus to the development of productive forces and the economy of conditions of production." He pointed out: "There is no doubt that when the law makes it impossible for capital to prolong the working day forever, capital strives to compensate by continuously increasing labor intensity, and turns every improvement in machinery into a means for intensifying the suction of labor power. This tendency of capital must soon reach a turning point where a further reduction in labor time becomes inevitable."
II. Your Time and My Time
As the 20th century progressed, both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces vied for the emotions and needs of the masses. Capitalists could rely on war and militarism, imperialism, and various other higher levels of the ruling stage, as well as the multiple ways workers are divided among themselves (such as racism, labor market segmentation, and gender differences in the spheres of production and reproduction), to achieve their own accumulation. Workers, meanwhile, adopted various methods to resist the practice of treating time as the commodity or property of the employing class. These resistances both embodied relentless class struggle and reinforced the logic of capital's ultimate authority.
In 1913, a massive strike by textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey, brought the "Silk City" of America to a standstill for four months. Simultaneously, the Eight-Hour League, led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), advocated for "Americanism from the bottom up" among the 25,000 strikers. Most of these strikers were immigrant women and children. These women, tasked with both domestic labor and factory work, were heartfelt supporters of reducing labor time. However, when the anarchist agitator Carlos Tresca suggested at a mass meeting that shortening working hours would make working men and women less tired, thus allowing them more time together, the women responded with a sullen silence. Tresca joked, "This way you can have more children," but the women were not amused. Noticing their somber reaction, the leader "Big Bill" Haywood interrupted and corrected Tresca's speech: "No, Carlos, we believe in birth control—fewer children, and taking good care of those children." The crowd of women erupted into laughter and thunderous applause.
Thus, although capitalism has weathered many storms, its hegemonic control [4] over rebellious labor and other potential opponents has been challenged on many fronts, including the world’s first proletarian revolution, the Russian October Revolution of 1917. In his work Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed provided a classic description of the October Revolution, arguing that it brought about a "newer, faster life." The seven-hour workday implemented in certain Soviet industrial sectors stood in sharp contrast to the situation in the United States: in America, the five-day, 40-hour work week was rare, existing mostly within the highly organized craft sectors of the construction industry and supported by the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). On the eve of the Great Depression, American manufacturing workers still faced long hours; fewer than 20% worked less than 48 hours per week, while 54% worked more than 49 hours, or even upwards of 60 hours. It was not until the World War II era in the 1940s that American unions broke the 40-hour week barrier—a standard that had been achieved much earlier in Europe and Australia.
Time was clearly biased against the worker; by 1915, the stopwatch had become a loathed symbol aiding capital in the rationalization of every movement of the laborer. As David Montgomery pointed out, with the introduction of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s "Scientific Management" system into American machine shops and other industries, the components of the labor process—the very fabric of workplace life—were subdivided and meticulously decomposed by time-study researchers whose contempt for workers reached shameless levels. For Taylorist managers, the measurement of time represented the progress of science in the service of capital. The mathematician and engineer Carl Barth introduced the Taylor system to the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, triggering a worker strike that led to a ban on time studies in national arsenals and navy shipyards from 1915 to 1949.
In a changing environment, due to the intensification of labor and constant conflicts over clocked working time, time was eventually incorporated into the customary rhythm and tone of recognized capital–labor conflict. To a large extent, time was being fundamentally rethought on the margins of the workers' movement and redefined as a decisive component of potentially transformative class struggle. Georges Sorel, in his book Reflections on Violence, sought to transcend the limitations of contemporary thought, imagining a future at "some indeterminate time" where residual notions of relationships and constraints could be left behind. Understandings such as these—sometimes conscious, more often unconscious—intersected with the informal activities resisting the planned order that occurred in many workplaces (both unorganized and organized). However, this disruption and negation of capitalist time was far removed from the legally constituted system of collective bargaining, which held an increasingly clear understanding of how unions should fight for time.
Therefore, the struggle surrounding time never truly ended; it is just that today there is no time to struggle. The centrality of time vanished along with its monetization. During the period of relative capitalist prosperity, the ascendancy of Keynesianism, the limited recognition of union power, and the implementation of the welfare state, union-led mobilizations for shorter hours subsided, and the formal struggle over the length of the working day fell into a stalemate. In the 1950s, unionism in the advanced capitalist economies of the West faltered, even as the gains made by organized labor were quite substantial—a scenario that continued through the 1960s and early 1970s. Time did not leave the negotiating table, but it was integrated into collective bargaining in a way that reinforced a radical economism [5], where the primary consideration in disputes was wages.
III. A Transition Period: Time and the 1960s
The 1960s witnessed the final boom of the postwar economy. The long-term struggle over labor time appeared resolved, prompting historians and social scientists to begin considering the question of leisure. This topic evolved quietly into a revival of interest, having been raised in a very mechanical fashion in Edward A. Ross’s sociology of social control. The Twentieth Century Fund, composed of liberal social scientists and progressives, along with its board of directors, conducted extensive research on time, work, and leisure, the results of which were published in 1962. Sociologists and historians developed a keen interest in mass entertainment and the distinction between work and leisure, particularly as this related to the understanding of modernization in mainstream political science and anthropology. Sidney Pollard provided groundbreaking insights into how factory discipline was instilled in workers during the Industrial Revolution. This was a time-saving process—what Pollard and Beatrice Webb called a "compulsory asceticism"—as they attacked the leisure activities of the common masses as "the very type of immoral idleness."
In the process of the materialist transformation of Hegel’s theory of alienation, Marx's reflections from 1844 resonated with the contradictions of a superficially affluent society that had not committed to overcoming human alienation through the establishment of a welfare state. Marx insisted that different classes have different and conflicting relationships with time, thereby extending Hegel's proposition that "time is the negative element in the sensible world." Within this conflicting relationship, the workday is "enslaved" by the commodity. The externalization (appropriation) of capital can only be experienced as "alienation." In Marx's view, labor time is entirely external to the worker. Such a discourse fit perfectly with the sensibilities of young radicals, the New Left’s intense pursuit of human liberation, and the postwar emphasis on the affluent society and leisure, and thus echoed repeatedly across various oppositional ideas. Tom Bottomore, quoting Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in 1965, emphasized that labor is "not voluntary, but coerced"; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to labor itself, the foundation of which is time itself. Consequently, workers in capitalist society, especially young workers who were not weighed down by the past experiences of constraint, instinctively grasped the difference between their working conditions and their periods of rest. Marx’s view that "the worker only feels himself outside his work" was also reflected in Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation.
The rethinking of time, its meaning, and its possibilities was at the heart of all these discussions. In the workplaces of advanced capitalist countries, young workers struggled against bosses, the state, and union bureaucracies, sometimes influenced by the developing ideas of the New Left. In his book One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse envisioned the scientific rationality of capitalism ending in "the possibility of an essentially new human reality—namely, existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled vital needs." In the words of the 1962 founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), The Port Huron Statement, if doing so seemed like "seeking the unattainable," it was actually the only way to "avoid the unimaginable."
IV. E.P. Thompson: Time in the Age of Affluence, Apathy, and Alienation
The aforementioned views were almost identical to E.P. Thompson's thoughts as he entered the 1960s as a member of the first generation of the British New Left. The issues he focused on included the need to explore historical themes of oppression, deprivation, and rebellion in ways that might indicate a "relevance to Marx’s concept of alienation." In the opening of Out of Apathy, the first collection of essays expressing the New Left position, Thompson declared that within the broader social context of Fabian gradualism [6], the new urgent issue was mobilization against the decay of capitalist society and the apathy of the populace. He argued that apathy and alienation could only be countered by breaking the "conventions that limit our lives," of which time was one such constraint.
Thompson’s highly influential work, The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963, prompted a timely turn in his research toward the past. The book addressed the 18th century, noting that the worker-predecessors who launched uprisings between 1790 and 1832 were prepared for proletarianization. The essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," found in his collection Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, is hailed as Thompson’s finest historical research. Based on extensive investigation, the essay points out that capitalism molds human nature into a strict adherence to time and a dominance of property/accumulation. However, few have studied this theoretically, placed it within the socio-cultural and political context of the work's era, or evaluated it based on its ongoing relevance. When writing this essay, Thompson was resolutely opposed to fashionable modernization theories. In his view, modernization—with its positivist, utilitarian, and quantifiable characteristics—seemed to suggest a smooth transition to industrial capitalism, compressing it into a path-model from "primitive" to "advanced" social forms. This reified the routes likely taken in Western Europe and North America and simplified human societies into an absolute dichotomy of "traditional" vs. "modern." This dichotomy obscured the complexities of history. In the May Day Manifesto, published in 1967 and 1968, he declared that modernization was the "theology" of neo-capitalism—an ideology that believes the present will never end, a technical means detached from the past that creates no future. It does not confront the antagonism of power, values, or interests, nor does it envision or encourage making priority choices between competing matters. Modernization theory perfectly adapted to the ideological planning of power to continue shaping a "disciplined labor force" on a global scale.
Opposing modernization theory as a barrier to overcoming apathy, alienation, and the failures of reformist social-democratic polities, Thompson cast his gaze toward Britain’s initial transition to industrial capitalism. In this dual focus on how the socialist opposition struggled in the 1960s and how it understood the costs paid during the 18th-century transition to industrial capitalism, Thompson turned to the study of time. His resulting inquiry into the origins of industrial capitalism constituted an empirical and conceptual investigation into how labor-power was recruited. His practical hypothesis was that time was subordinated to the requirements of capital, standing in sharp contrast to the traditional practices of peasants tilling the soil, artisans engaged in handicraft production, or women performing various domestic labors. A vital aspect of this historical process was the creation of a disciplined wage-labor class, which was a prerequisite for capital to achieve its hegemonic capitalist control. The fundamental process of establishing this capitalist prerequisite is generally known as primitive accumulation [7], in which the issues of the dispossession of the peasantry and colonization are particularly prominent. In Marx’s words, these historical events "are written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire."
Thompson selected the part of this study concerning the process of dispossession and added a cultural dimension to the interpretation, understanding it as the gradual habituation of the forming worker to an entirely different mentality: that time is constituted by the commands of capital and is independent of natural cycles. As the clock ticked, a new relationship was established between the laborer and work and its discipline; the entire culture changed. In the process of transforming plebeian producers into capitalist workers, the internalization of time-discipline was decisive. Thompson argued that the pressures of transition fell upon the whole culture: both the resistance to change and the acquiescence to it arose from the culture as a whole. He concluded: "We are not studying here merely the changes in manufacturing techniques, which required a more synchronized labor and more precise timing in the whole of society; we are also considering what happened to these changes as they survived within the nascent industrial capitalist society."
Thompson’s instinctive hostility toward the disciplinary logic of capitalism led to his bewilderment at the 1960s sociologists’ discussions of the "problem of leisure." He asked: "How could this become a problem?" Immersed in the ideology of the Age of Affluence, Thompson wondered what had prompted the industrialized world to escape its past economic conditions of poverty, and whether the Puritan valuation of time would decompose as the pressures of poverty waned. "Will people begin to lose that sense of anxious urgency, that desire to consume time purposefully? Most people have this urgency and desire, just as they wear watches on their wrists." Looking back at the essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" after more than half a century, what stands out most is the extent to which the debate over time was situated at the peak of the post-WWII capitalist boom.
Grabbing hold of capital’s self-congratulatory view that it had already achieved "expanded leisure," Thompson looked to the past for answers on how people spent time rather than consuming or squandering it. He noted that "if the use of time becomes less purposeful, it might be possible for people to relearn some of the arts of living lost in the Industrial Revolution," to "relearn how to fill the gaps in their day with richer, more leisurely personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life. Thus, a new dialectic will emerge, in which some long-established enterprise and discipline migrate to the newly industrializing countries, while the old industrial countries attempt to rediscover forgotten patterns of experience from before written history." Thompson believed that the task-orientation of the peasant, the village, and the domestic economy was more easily understood than timed labor. Task-oriented labor communities displayed minimal boundaries between work and life, and social interaction and labor were intertwined in historical eras unaccustomed to labor measured by the clock.
Thompson believed that the need to solve the problem of alienation in the 1960s was extremely urgent, a time when time-discipline seemed most unbearable and faced resistance from many quarters. Consequently, Thompson underestimated the harshness, oppressiveness, and divergence of the various task-oriented forms of work that had developed within political economy in the centuries prior to the arrival of industrial capitalism and its time-managed workplace. He certainly never questioned the fundamental assumption that the more closely life and work are integrated, the better. This assumption failed to confront how decisively capital had permeated every aspect of human experience by the 1960s—a process of conquest that was less apparent in earlier (often pre-capitalist) eras. Equally prominent is that Thompson’s hypothesis underestimated the oppression of women’s lives, constrained as they were by biological reproduction, subsistence labor, and the specific female schedules constituted by domestic life, which was itself a harsh taskmaster.
Certainly, Thompson recognized that the plebeians and the working class, subjected to time-discipline for centuries, had been struggling against this relentless scheduling. However, the result of this resistance was that they became increasingly adapted to these constraints. In "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Thompson may have truncated his treatment of the problem of time, failing to clarify that the "whole culture" was crisscrossed in a fragmented manner—fragments that manifested in the dialectic of resistance, undermining a sense of "totality." True, capital appropriated time and redefined it according to the logic of its political economy. Yet, throughout society, the capitalist conception of time was not fully instilled in those immigrant families or marginalized groups. The colonization of Indigenous peoples was never completed; for them, the issue of time allowed them to resist their subordinate status as the dispossessed until the very end. Furthermore, capitalism has long been crisis-ridden; recurring recessions and cycles of boom and bust have caused frustratingly regular imbalances in the authority of work-discipline. If this reality check was obscured by the prosperity manifested in the seemingly leisurely 1960s, it would manifest violently in the instability triggered by the post-1973 economic stagnation and crisis.
Following the transition period of the 1960s, time seemed to maintain a peculiar relationship between labor and leisure. Alienation became the price of affluence. The recurring cyclical nature of capitalist crises did not reconstruct the acceptable notion of "a fair day’s work" [8]; rather, it brutally restricted the very contemplation of this concept. Whether in academia or elsewhere, the focus on the question of the leisure society did not persist. In the sense of the possibilities Thompson himself envisioned developing after the 1960s, leisure itself became a fantasy. Alienation remained, but it was now heavily battered by the increasingly shrinking, insecure, or "flexible" employment opportunities of industrial capitalism. These job opportunities manifested in the restructured class relations of advanced capitalist countries, and a similar process was evident in the intensified exploitation of global South enterprises. Capital fuses the new with the old, but over time, it remains firmly in control of its position. As the ancients said: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
V. Our Era: The Return of the Vampire
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, in "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," predicted what the world would look like in 2030. Even with ten years still to go before Keynes’s prediction, we can conclude that, barring a catastrophic revolutionary shift, his suggestions about how people living in the 21st century would live are almost entirely wrong. He predicted that by then, the workday would be a three-hour shift, and five days of hard work would add up to only 15 hours.
Keynes believed that capitalism possessed the capacity to use technology and various forms of income redistribution rationally to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Everyone would gain something. The leisure society should have arrived. But this was not the case. Capitalism devoured its own components; it waged wars and created terrifying weapons of mass destruction; its imperialist pursuit of profit spanned the globe without end; it destroyed the ecology. Periodic crises—depressions and downturns—are characteristic of its shifting political economy, "cleansing" the capitalist organism of evolutionary failures with a cruelty equal to any known evolutionary process in natural selection. Those who bear the brunt of capitalism’s ill effects are the dispossessed: the Indigenous peoples of the New World, long removed from the land and resources that sustained their subsistence economies; the urban and rural poor of the "developed" old world economies of the West; people of color, whether in these privileged countries or as the primary populations of regions subordinate to them, who constitute a reserve army of labor that can be mobilized according to the needs of capital. Capital has not been as rational as Keynes hoped; it excludes many people from its calculations and conditions of development. Considerations of time rarely extend to envisioning "a fair day’s work," but are concerned only with how the workday—whether in its length or its reconfiguration—meets the needs of capital. And these are the scenes from the best of times.
The worst of times have arrived. After 1973, global capitalism entered a period riddled with crises. In the post-WWII era of apparent affluence, strong unions, and a robust welfare state, the stability of the eight-hour day and the possibility of new ways for the working class to reclaim time collapsed. The fiscal crisis of the state limited the government's ability to alleviate human suffering and ended the focus on the legitimacy of "fairness," which had protected working-class rights and expanded the welfare safety net. For decades, we have lived in the shadow of this demise.
Among the many losses is the re-appropriation of time. As Marx noted, "the working day is not a constant, but a variable," an elastic cord that capital constantly seeks to stretch, "setting no limit to the working day" and "setting no limit to surplus labor." Marx insisted that the capitalist would always "strive to extend the working day as much as possible, if possible, turning one working day into two." In a classic case describing the more general process of class formation, in the words of Nick Dyer-Witheford, "this is a vampire relationship... the transfer of energy, time, and consciousness—that is, the extraction of surplus value—from one part of a species to another." Statistics from the OECD Employment Outlook show that from 1970 to 2005, the working hours per employed adult in the United States increased by 12%. The major economies of the European Union established strong social safety nets, but due to the 2008–2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, these safety nets have reached their limit. The latest estimates show that the average weekly working hours in Canada and the United States are nearly 47 hours, while comparable figures in the technology and finance sectors are as high as approximately 60 hours.
In fact, time is at the core of almost all trends of automation, digitalization, and work reorganization in late capitalism. Globally, working hours have shortened somewhat. By the late 1990s, the number of unemployed and underemployed exceeded one billion, accounting for about 30% of the world’s total labor force. Due to increased labor intensity in certain industries, the workday often extends late into the night, while in other industries, working hours are constantly under attack and workers' means of subsistence are wantonly slashed. Over the next 30 years, in countries like the United States, as well as less competitive European economies like Portugal and Greece, automation and digitalization will eliminate 40% to 60% of jobs. In garment, textile, and footwear factories in Vietnam and Cambodia, 85% of jobs are threatened by automation. Leisure is not an autonomous choice for these displaced workers. However, for those standing on assembly lines, at workbenches, or working in hyper-exploitative industries, the workday is often either extended or scattered across multiple jobs; they need more time to earn enough income to supplement basic life necessities.
Just as it has done throughout its entire history, capital has consistently subordinated time to itself in various new ways, and now it simultaneously restores old modes of coercion. Yet the logic of its temporal appropriation remains consistent, holding steady amidst the shifting relations of production and the changing nature of class struggle. Currently, in a period where capital occupies a dominant position and labor is in a relatively weakened state, time has become increasingly vengeful. The fusion of the old and the new is perhaps most evident in the so-called "gig economy," where artificial intelligence, digital platforms, mobile communications, and other technologies intersect with globalization to re-engineer labor processes, thereby transforming the nature of work and, most importantly, working hours. In this ostensibly knowledge-production economy, employment is less likely to be tied to a traditional factory-style workplace or even to a specific firm. Recruitment is often conducted remotely on an on-demand basis; the slogan is "flexibility," but the result is "casualization." Promoters of the gig economy claim that over 40% of the U.S. workforce is now employed in this sector. This type of work is dispersed globally, allowing the regulation of working hours and wages/salaries, as well as the enforcement of social security provisions, to escape the jurisdiction of any single nation-state.
All of this coincides with technological innovation and the ideological onslaught of neoliberalism, yet it is also quite "old," as it breaks down the traditional division between work and life established after the Industrial Revolution. Labor in the gig economy can be performed anywhere, upending any notion of free time, while employers can utilize platforms to subject their employees to 24-hour surveillance. Much of this toil is routinized to a numbing degree and its alienation is exacerbated by sub-poverty wages. Each piece of information, captured for just a few cents, is used to construct data compilations that are then marketed by monopolies such as Amazon. In on-demand work arranged by centralized corporate platforms, the responsibility for owning the means of production—such as an automobile—falls upon the worker. Thus, the illusion of independence fuels the development of the gig economy. But this work is actually a regression to the "putting-out system" [9] of early capitalism and shifts many costs onto the worker. Workers are not remunerated by the hour but by tasks that are often minutely fragmented. The result is exactly as Marx pointed out long ago: "by the compulsory extension of the working-day beyond its natural limits."
However, in the history of the struggle over time and the composition of labor-time, we have reached a new starting point. Under no circumstances can the battle cry of the "eight-hour day" sufficiently meet our needs any longer, just as there is a need to reconsider "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay."
VI. Time: Farewell to What, and to Whom?
Current proposals to focus discussion on reducing working hours echo a call made in the 1980s by André Gorz and Rudolf Bahro, who urged the formulation of a "policy of time" and a "new economy of time" to transform the "capitalist social order and quality of life." However, these proposals may not be enough. While the "vampire" [10] allows those subordinated to it to fight for what they need, as long as time remains subject to the control of capital, the vampire will only suck back more.
For example, Gorz identified the limitations of an analytical framework that demands less work, more leisure, and new methods of consumption. In a fully reformed capitalist society, all of this could be achieved, yet the traditional working class would cease to exist, replaced by "non-producers" at the vanguard of change. Like Keynes, Gorz believed that under capitalism, automation, work-sharing, part-time work, and flexible employment were all possible and could lead to a revolutionary transformation of labor-time, thereby significantly reducing the working day.
For Gorz, "free time" was predicated on the "abolition of work." Work was viewed as degradation, an alienated process where the individual is stripped of collective possibilities. "Proletarians have internalized their dispossession to confirm their total dependence; their needs are completely controlled... Since their work is useful to society but not to themselves, society should satisfy all their needs and pay a wage for every kind of work." Gorz was the author of Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal; the extensive discussion of the working class in that book reflected the imaginative spirit of the 1960s New Left far more than his subsequent manifestos published in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, it remained nothing more than a pathetic manifesto of displacement. It proceeded from Gorz’s insistence on an absolute separation between the "realm of necessity" and the "realm of freedom" that cannot be mixed, spiraling down from a misreading of Marx’s insistence on the dialectical relationship between these two realms. However, as Marx fully recognized, humanity will never win freedom except by acknowledging and participating in necessity. All the insights in Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class—which demands a recalibration of time within the project of human emancipation—are realized through a false utopianism, in which work and the working class are both unilaterally understood as negations, and class struggle is ultimately viewed as an atavism.
Gorz failed to grasp two of Marx’s fundamental principles, both of which he resolutely opposed in his later analysis: first, that class formation is a tortuous historical process and thus necessarily a collective rather than an individual task; and second, that the meaning of time, whether under capitalist conditions or beyond them into socialist reconstruction, will always be a class struggle. As Marx asserted: "In the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working-day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class."
In contrast to Marx, Gorz assumed that capital’s capacity to expand production was infinite, paying no attention to imperialism and its role in maintaining the economic health of empires and metropolitan centers. He treated the question of time as a problem that only the "First World" needed to solve, thus exhibiting a strong racial bias. His predictions were predicated on the historical trajectory of advanced Western capitalist economies continuing forward, assuming that a 5% annual productivity growth was easily achievable. Gorz conjectured that by 2001, the weekly working time would be reduced to 20 hours. A matrix of new values, culture, and interpersonal relationships would give birth to an entirely new species, liberated from the ethical shackles of acceleration, punctuality, and repressive affect. Authority itself would soften, forced to view the wage-earning class as "autonomous individuals seeking cooperation rather than demanding obedience." In this elevation of humanity, wage labor would "gradually cease to be the center of people's lives," and the working class would eventually cease to exist. The liberation of time might come from declarations by those in power: "Releasing time through the free choice of working hours is the best and fastest way to 'change the quality of life' and create jobs. Regarding social and postal services, all that is needed from local governments, hospitals, and health centers is a simple ministerial directive to ensure that working within freely chosen hours becomes a reality."
This suggestion of an easy and comfortable choice of time is far removed from—and indeed the polar opposite of—the developments in the forty years since Gorz’s manifesto was published. Evolution has proven that Marx is a better guide than the Gorz of Farewell to the Working Class in helping us recognize time and how it is exploited under late capitalism.
After all, Marx recognized that, setting aside progress in productive forces, innovation, and improvement, development under capitalist conditions only extends rather than shortens labor-time; what is shortened is the time necessary for general social reproduction, but "not the time necessary for capitalist labor." Human development, rather than the improvement of a privileged social stratum, becomes possible only when time itself escapes the vampire’s clutches, so that the power of "one social stratum to shake off the natural necessity of labor from itself and transfer it to another" is seized from the few elites. Of course, this view is predicated on the existence of such a thing as "society." This peculiar idea is actually built upon a quite old, long-overdue, and equally peculiar premise: that society only truly exists when the abolition of the class and wage systems makes discussions of a "fair day's work" themselves obsolete.
Setting time free is of great significance to the ongoing class struggle, achieved through a refusal to incorporate all considerations of time into the grids used for calculating wages and recording work hours. The promise of "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" is correct and just, beloved by past generations of labor activists, but it is also undoubtedly at the heart of capital accumulation. Our era requires a new sense of dedication: the abolition of the wage system. The transcendence of this idea will be predicated on the negation of the fairness of any wage. For a wage implies that work itself should be the responsibility and necessary activity of one social class, forced to produce for a much smaller privileged class that controls the duration of the alienated working day. In May 1968, the walls of the besieged streets of Paris were covered in graffiti, one of which read: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" For on the beach, rather than scheduling time, compensating for time, or killing time, people are enjoying time.
(Author: Bryan D. Palmer, Trent University, Ontario, Canada; Translators: Deng Jianhua, School of Foreign Languages, Northeastern University; Zhu Chunyan, School of Marxism, Northeastern University)
Online Editor: Tong Xin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, 2023, No. 4 Socialist Register 2021, Vol. 57, originally published at www.merlinpress.co.uk, translation abridged. This translation is a phased result of the 2022 Liaoning Provincial Social Science Fund Project "Research on the Generation Mechanism and Resolution Path of the Digital Labor Paradox from the Perspective of Historical Materialism."